"You can't fix it. You can't make it go away.
I don't know what you're going to do about it,
But I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm just
going to walk away from it. Maybe
A small part of it will die if I'm not around
feeding it anymore."
--Lew Welch

How to tell a story

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Just watched Amigo, the 2011 Sayles film set in a village during the Philippine-American war at the birth of the 20th century, the birth of American empire. A small gem, like so much of his work. Highly recommended.

Onward, Christian soldiers! Duty's way is plain;
Slay your Christian neighbors, or by them be slain,
Pulpiteers are spouting effervescent swill,
God above is calling you to rob and rape and kill,
All your acts are sanctified by the Lamb on high;
If you love the Holy Ghost, go murder, pray and die.

Onward, Christian soldiers! Rip and tear and smite!
Let the gentle Jesus bless your dynamite.
Splinter skulls with shrapnel, fertilize the sod;
Folks who do not speak your tongue deserve the curse of God.
Smash the doors of every home, pretty maidens seize;
Use your might and sacred right to treat them as you please.

Onward, Christian soldiers! Eat and drink your fill;
Rob with bloody fingers, Christ okays the bill,
Steal the farmers' savings, take their grain and meat;
Even though the children starve, the Savior's bums must eat,
Burn the peasants' cottages, orphans leave bereft;
In Jehovah's holy name, wreak ruin right and left.

Onward, Christian soldiers! Drench the land with gore;
Mercy is a weakness all the gods abhor.
Bayonet the babies, jab the mothers, too;
Hoist the cross of Calvary to hallow all you do.
File your bullets' noses flat, poison every well;
God decrees your enemies must all go plumb to hell.

In a world filled with so much horror, there are two strategies for living in it. You can be a citizen-consumer and ignore horror, or distract yourself from it, or believe the system itself can fix it; or you can be an artisan-artist and create good work to counter-balance the horror, knowing it can't be fixed. You can participate; or you can counter-participate.

The easier it is to drop out and counter-participate, the freer the society and the more tempting the "rewards" for not dropping out in the first place. The key is understanding that only positive energy can neutralize negative energy. You don't get rid of horror. You match it with anti-horror.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

In My Dinner With Andre, Andre proposes that we're entering a new Dark Ages, which may last a long time, and those of us interested in preserving high culture must hide out in isolated enclaves, protecting the artifacts of culture, even as some of us add to them; we have to lay low, waiting for a new enlightenment. In a different context, Morris Berman says today the best writing is necessarily underground because the mainstream culture won't admit it's dying, which is the starting point for writing about reality.

Let's say you've been reading
American history most of
your adult life, over half
a century now, and in that time
you've reached some conclusions
not taught in high school
the usual suspects about
genocide against American Indians
lynchings of black citizens
concentration camps for Japanese citizens
and the most extraordinary atrocity
of all, November 22, 1963,
a coup d'etat orchestrated by rogue
elements in the government
and you accept all these
things as true

and you widen the focus
to the world, where good deeds
get lost in an historic avalanche of
war and genocide and butchery
mass graves, killing fields
(inspiration for future video games)
hard to keep track of it all

and all this, too, is true

It's hard to avoid the conclusion
that the United States is no better
than a Banana Republic, though
more livable than most, with
perks like shopping and mythology
and escape valves for discontent
like talk shows and voting
and it's hard to avoid the conclusion
that civilization is an asylum
run by sadists

a lifetime studying history
two sad conclusions
so the question naturally arises
how possibly to live here?

If you have the stomach for it, this 6-part BBC documentary establishes beyond belief the human capacity for calculated depravity. Don't get smug. Our genocide against American Indians, slave trade with its lynchings, and contemporary torturing of terrorism suspects are no models of humanism. Depravity is an equal opportunity employer. Just don't watch this one on a full stomach. These disciples of Goethe and Wagner may convince you that civilization is an asylum.

Friday, April 26, 2013

Feels like I'm coming full circle ... Brown, Blake ... the real fight, the mental fight ... the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought ... inspiring my first play, Above the Fire, Strah in lead in Oregon, national T Williams one act winner ... and I've been telling variations on this theme ever since ... to a shrinking audience, or so it feels ... but I go on, a majority of one.

Now and again through my life I've gone on a crusade to turn thinking people on to Love's Body, Norman O. Brown's masterwork. The first time was in grad school. Maybe I need to do this once more, here in my final act. Hmm.

NPR interviews this morning with two reporters who wrote about the carjack and shootout with the Boston bombing brothers. Such excitement in the questions and storytelling! They could have been discussing the latest Tom Cruise movie.

I think of some kid hearing this. How cool! I want to be in a shootout when I grow up!

We are our own worst enemies. No progress since Homer, why should anyone expect any?

Norman Brown nailed it. War is war perverted: the problem is not the war but the perversion. Literal meanings. Decline of Imagination. After Blake: the real fight, the mental fight. The Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought. !!! Yes indeed, Brown nailed it.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

This is the best of two films made about Steve Prefontaine, whose running career at the Univ of Oregon coincided with my years there in grad school. Unlike the other, this doesn't run from a probable contributor to his fatal car accident, his own recklessness. Crudup and Sutherland as Pre and Bowerman are terrific.

Lots of personal memories in this film shot on location. I was there. Indeed my office was in the building burned down by radicals in one scene.

Creator of The Event. Although Wauters had five years of the story planned, NBC pulled this series, a sci fi thriller, after a single season. An official failure.

Too sophisticated for lowest common denominator programming, I guess. I loved it. In fact, I'd call it the best "aliens among us" story I've seen. I very much admire its craft of suspenseful storytelling and its high production values.

Without beating you over the head with them, some interesting themes emerge: idealism v. pragmatism in politics; when and if ends justify means; country patriotism v. self-interest.

Ends up there was a small club of fanatical fans, each feeling alone until they found one another on the Internet, that was outraged by the cancellation. But today mainstream culture is driven by the limited perceptions of the lowest common denominator.

I applaud writer/producer Wauters. I think he created a classic in its genre.

Monday, April 22, 2013

Revisiting NBC's 2010 series, a high octane sci-fi thriller with quicker plot twists than a celebrity marriage, and elevated both by its rich, complicated characters and non-chronological storytelling strategy of modular vignettes. Never a dull moment and, except for a deranged journalist with whom I completely identify, no attempt at heavy meanings. Great edge-of-your-seat entertainment.

I stumbled upon this documentary and started it out of curiosity, not expecting much. But I was surprised by this story of the rise and fall of NY governor Eliot Spitzer.

This may be the best documentary about the functional heart and soul of America that I've ever seen. Not the theory or mythology of our government and culture, but its actual practice. The cover of the DVD box says it all: Money. Sex. Power. Betrayal.

But the story isn't as simple as it seems. Yes, we have greed and obscene wealth here, high end escort services and corruption; we also have philanthropy, the NY art scene, well-meaning progressives at work. There is drama and farce and comedy, both light and dark. And a few heroes.

I think the interviewed women working at the escort service are heroes. They are bright and rational and live in the real world. They make their living, and a very good living it is indeed at three grand an hour, on biology. Talk about the American Dream.

I think the filmmaker, Alex Gibney, is a hero. He gets the major streams in our culture right. Not a pretty sight but a true one.

Sometimes in this cold house when even turning up the heat when even putting on a coat don't help, the only alternative is to go back to bed and get under the covers which doesn't always help either but at least it provides the right image.

Sometimes I feel like I'm trapped in a movie house and can't leave until the film is over but it's the longest most boring movie I've ever seen, the same story repeated over and over again, okay with different actors and different settings but the same actions, over and over until I want to scream, I might as well be trapped in an elevator with endless Muzak

and you get desperate when subjected to this kind of torture, you take risks you might not take otherwise attempts to escape the movie house just for the variety of it and you come up with outrageous schemes to stop the movie to pull the electric plug plunge the city into darkness anything but this

which is about the time the film teases you with change a new plot point! but no, just a clever tease to keep you engaged nothing new here at all the same repetitive story new actors, new setting on and on and on no end in sight unless you drop dead on the spot

Here we go again
an early morning shootout
one marathon suspect dead
one on the run
two young brothers from Russia
one "like an angel"
it's "beyond belief" they are violent
according to classmates
which of course is why
they exchanged gun fire
with the police.

Listen, when reality collides
with your belief system
it's time to change your beliefs.

At the door
Sketch lets me know
he wants out; later
he comes in, shakes
himself dry and gets comfortable
on the couch, basic needs
addressed.

What dogs believe is
what dogs need, according
to their nature, not
according to their

1/
(AT RISE: Inside a ramshackle cabin.
It's an under-furnished mess and clearly
hasn't been lived in for a long time.)

(At a table sits HANK, 60s. He is dressed
in outdoor gear, as if he planned to take
off on a hike somewhere.)

(Prominent on the table are a bottle of
whiskey and an outdoor vest from
which wires hang out. This was, in fact,
an attempt at making a bomb.)

(Someone is shouting at Hank from
outside. This is CHEYENNE, 30s, his
daughter.)

CHEYENNE (OS)
Dad, please let me in!

(Hank takes a swig from the bottle. No
response.)

CHEYENNE (OS)
I'm not going away ... so you might as well unlock the
door. ... Dad, for God's sake! Unlock the door!

HANK
(not loud)
It's not locked.

Read the play
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the last play I wrote. 2008. Probably the last I'll ever write. Never produced. Well, never marketed. This note says why:

Performance rights to Oregon Dream will not be

available until after the author’s death. At that time,

contact his widow, Harriet Levi, for information:

amelia693@yahoo.com.

This play illustrates what I mean when I say my work comes from "whole cloth": the autobiographical elements, the echoes from my short film Deconstructing Sally, my poem I'm Not Fit Company, the work of Norman Brown and Bertrand Russell. One long continuing story. Variations on a theme.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

This documentary asks the question, Would Vietnam have gone differently if JFK had lived?

Oregon Sen. Wayne Morse thought so. Before his death, Morse said Kennedy had implied to him personally that he was withdrawing from Vietnam. This film reaches the same conclusion.

Here the argument traces six different occasions when Kennedy disregarded military advice and avoided confrontation and likely war. This past would have extended to Vietnam, the same mind at work.

A highlight here are extended clips from Kennedy's press conferences. How good mannered they seem! How smart the journalists seem! What honor they give our Republic! A far cry from the embarrassment of political discourse today.

This documentary spends too much time on LBJ after the assassination, drifting from its focus. Otherwise, it's a fine job.

Listening to Royals-Braves game on Fire app. Don't follow these teams but wanted the SOUND of baseball in the house. Sound of summer. Maybe it fools me into feeling warm. Love the sound of baseball on the radio.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

They appear without fanfare grandson and girlfriend out of contact for many months now "hi grandma!" here they are stopping by on their way from here to there traveling by thumb, hitchhiking this grandson who's never heard of Jack Kerouac arriving for favors, which we give them, meals, showers, clean laundry, and something special, a surprise gift, a small tent and better sleeping bags than theirs to send them off in style in a matter of hours spending the night elsewhere before they head north all thumbs and spirit too young to be vagrants on their hitchhiking adventure

and watching them go I remember my own travels by thumb at 19 from Berkeley to Louisville for Derby Day, 1959 and I want to thank them for bringing this memory to life after so long but nothing happens quickly at my age and by the time I think of this they are gone back on the road, all thumbs and spirit, with no time for an old man's war stories.

Surprise of surprises, H's 19 y.o. grandson and his girlfriend appeared on our doorstep. They're in a traveling mode, hitchhiking (!!!) around the country. Hey, that's what I was doing at 19 (without a girlfriend), so I approve and had fun trading war stories.

He lost 60 lbs, is clean and sober, and is much more mature. He can join the rat race later if he has to. I think he was surprised to find me so supportive of living on the road.

Someone checked out the paperback version of The Seagull Hyperdrama, which doesn't happen often and certainly is not the easiest way to read the layered story. An adventurous reader indeed! Probably read the Build Your Own Adventure series as a kid, which uses a similar principle. Was this series the first published hyperdrama?

You see the role a lot in film: the likeable fuckup, punished by the villain, but the fuckup keeps grinning, the villain raises the ante, the fuckup keeps grinning, Paul Newman was great at this.

If terrorists are like villains, may we be like fuckups, grinning an appreciation of the mundane and special rhythms of life, even through our tears, even through our desire for revenge, may we always cherish the very things a bomb hopes to destroy, and go on grinning as if this pain and punishment bring no more distraction than the buzzing of a fly.

1
Sorry but I don't trust you.
Nothing personal. What's
at work here is bigger
than both of us. It's called
reality.

You see them on TV
all the time, neighbors
shocked by the news
that the young man with
the big smile, who drove
your daughter to the
emergency room, who
drove you to work when
your car didn't start,
turns out to be what?
a pedophile rapist murderer
assassin for the mob
but he couldn't have chopped
up his girlfriend, that sweet
thing? and put her parts
in the freezer in the garage
he gave the kids ice cream
from that freezer this can't be

But it is. Did I mention
I don't trust you?

2
I am old enough to remember
when everyone trusted everyone.
You didn't have to lock your doors
in Milford, New Jersey. You
kept the car idling while you
ran into the post office.

Even in the 1960s, hiking in
the San Gabriel mountains
north of L.A., you could find
a furnished unlocked cabin
with a note on the table:
"Please clean up after yourself
and leave a contribution for
the food you eat. Thank you."

As late as the 1980s in
Elgin, Oregon, I visited
an old friend and found
nobody home, the house
unlocked, expensive belongings
everywhere, stereo and TV,
art on the walls, all there for
the taking, all safe in Elgin.
I waited an hour before
they got home.

I'm old enough to remember
a different reality.

3
That was then.
This is now.

You may be Mother Teresa's
clone. You may be the next
TV pervert. Sorry, but

Monday, April 15, 2013

A friend reminded me that Welch's comments on polluted Chicago - you can't fix it - also apply to the ingrained attitude toward dying. Another reader wrote that corporations make too much money keeping old folks alive for as long as possible to let us choose an early exit.

Both are probably right. Welch took a gun into the mountains and entered the food chain. There may be no more honorable alternative.

I don't own a gun and haven't shot one since the army. Whole situation pisses me off. Maybe in time I'll get lucky and follow the family tradition.

In a zero sum universe, I try to balance negative energy, like the Boston Marathon terrorist attacks, with something immediately positive. In this case I watched once again the Michael Caine performance in The Quiet American, a story about terrorist attacks in an earlier era, at the end of the French occupation of Vietnam as the Americans prepared to replace them. A brilliant performance, except for the ending a good version of the equally brilliant novel by Graham Greene. Now I feel better. Art is good medicine. Helps get through the sadness.

I doubt if the Death Cafe meeting will give me the forum I seek but maybe I can meet some people who share my concerns. I want seniors to control the circumstances of death in a supportive environment. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out how to do this.

Expand Oregon's Death with Dignity Act in this way: at some age - the lower, the more controversial, so let's say 80 for the sake of argument - any Oregon citizen can get a peaceful pill for passing. Illness is not required! Age and desire are sufficient.

I want to be part of a political action group that works to get this done. I don't even know where to begin. We'd obviously need legal brains in the group.

Presently you have to have a terminal illness, then find a doctor to give you the pill. What's a terminal illness? For example, my pacemaker lasts four years. What if I refuse to have it replaced? Do I have a terminal illness? If not, can I be a test case and challenge it in court?

Seniors already have a moral right to die as they choose, in my view. But society makes it difficult, ugly, even illegal. They need, WE need, the legal control of our deaths.

Maybe at the Death Cafe I can find others for political action. And maybe not.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Just watched Happy, the documentary, which asks the question, What makes us happy? Its strengths are an international perspective and a good balance between science and personal profiles. Its weakness is an incomplete, optimistic view of group behavior - think the French revolution and Lord of the Flies. A thought-provoking film.

For much of my writing career I've been a collaborator. Writing for actors as a playwright and screenwriter, it's the nature of the beast. And I've been fortunate: as playwright-in-residence at two theater companies (and a third online, meeting in a chat room); as director of minifilms of my own scripts, working with the same actors, I've had good, satisfying, creative collaborations. Once I was commissioned to write a play on a particular historical person using four, and only four, particular actors. The experience was a joy and no less than Hal Prince called the result "first rate work." Collaboration has been good to me.

But not always. Journalism, too, has its collaboration with editors, readership and advertisers. When I was managing editor at Oregon Business Magazine I frequently had to cut stories at the last minute in order to fit one more ad into the magazine. I hated it.

I retired as a playwright and filmmaker in order to retire as a collaborator. I wasn't tired of working with actors per se; I was tired of the logistics that go with it, the scheduling, the problem over there that creates one over here, the stress of juggling so many balls, trying to keep them all in the air. I wanted to spend the end of my life as a solo creator.

In the Hollywood hills in the 1950s, Aldous Huxley and his remarkable second wife, Laura, hosted a small community of artists and intellectuals, exploring most of the "new" ideas and practices later attributed to the sixties. This documentary tells the fascinating story.

By and large, it seems to me that
there are more good individuals
in the world than good groups
of people. Whenever people come
together in a formal way
into clubs and committees
into organizations and companies
into corporations and governments

there's a shift in the moral landscape
people become profiles
lives become lists
tragedies become talking points
and a bureaucrat is born.

Friday, April 12, 2013

My fictional characters waiting to be born have bad manners. They'll invade my thoughts at any moment, arriving unannounced. Having my attention, they are apt to do anything.

And so it was that Brinkley entered my head as I was driving to help H unpack her art. He told me the most outrageous backstory about his life and new outrageous elements in his belief system. The thing is, now he's a more complex and eccentric - and entertaining- character than before.

This documentary about screenwriting was sent by the gods. It reinforces a number of things I've already told my students - but I think some don't buy it until someone Famous tells them, somebody who wrote a movie they've heard of. I show it early on in my 10-week class. Today.

Weekend work is reviewing their story ideas.

Really glad I got to read my colleague's book/journal parody. What a different writing climate it comes out of! Aiming for the highest, not the lowest, common denominator.

A colleague shared a project with me that really brought home how much literary taste has changed. The book is an edgy parody of an academic journal, with its barbs and satire extending to its footnotes and ads. One article investigates, for example, whether Sylvia Plath's birth certificate is authentic.

Intellectual foolery like this was common in the sixties from authors like Barthelme, Coover, Barth. The thing is, the humor assumes certain knowledge, which is lost or fading today. I doubt if many of my colleague's own students would get the satire.

But I loved it. And I loved the fact that he spent so much time and energy on something so esoteric.

In the Army Security Agency I had a Top Secret Codeword security clearance. This is pretty high. My colleague and future best friend, the late Dick Crooks, translated the disturbing message that became the Berlin Wall: major movements of supplies and troops were heading to the city. It suggested an invasion, and every American soldier in Europe went on alert.

Long before this, my own military career did not begin smoothly. On a train to Baumholder, I was pulled off just before we got there. I was told there was a problem with my security clearance. Until it was straightened out, I would remain here on TDY, temporary duty.

It was winter and snowed every day. I was given a chow pass and issued bedding. That's it. I found a bed, found the small base library and read all day. I got away with this for almost a week before a sergeant noticed me and wondered why in hell I wasn't shoveling snow.

I made a deal with him. I'd volunteer for the earliest snow brigade at the Officers Quarters, 3 to 7 a.m., if he'd assign me to the library for the rest of my day's duty. He did, and I got off at noon.I liked the gig. He also loaned me money because I was broke.

This adventure lasted almost a month. I was told my clearance had been miss filed. I never believed them. I figured I was getting special attention for two possible reasons: I had joined in Berkeley, that lefty mecca; and at Cal Tech I had become a Linus Pauling groupy, peddling his new book, No More War. At any rate I finally was off to do what I had been trained 12 months to do.

In Baumholder my reputation had preceded me. My drinking buddies from the language school had been talking me up as a mathematical genius. Maybe I could solve a pressing problem, predicting the additive change. This referred to a page, 00 to 99, in a captured book of codewords used by the Russian army units in East Germany. If the "additive," or top page, was known, all the others fell into place and all the intercepted messages could be identified. But this top page changed about once a week or so, and until the change was figured out, we didn't know who was saying what. It would be terrific if we could predict these additive changes.

After more initial training I was called into the CO's office before final assignment. Did I want to look at the additive problem?

I was baffled by the offer. Why weren't real mathematicians at the Pentagon solving it? Probably were. What the captain saw, I quickly understood, was a chance to roll the dice for major. Sure, I'll look at it.

I suppose I looked like a math whiz to the army. I'd been to Cal Tech. I'd even published in a math journal. But I knew better. The beauty of math is you always know exactly where you stand.

What I was trying to do was predict what came next in a series of numbers. Not my area of expertise. No access to books that would teach me something. But I did notice a few things.

For example, no number got repeated in the same calendar year. Hmm. After a while, pressure mounted on me to make a prediction. What would come next? I had no idea. I also was getting bored. Even though I was being treated like a big shot, like an officer, with more or less a duty day defined by myself, once I understood I was in over my head, I was bored. I wanted to do what I'd been trained to do.

So I figured I'd make a prediction, it would be wrong, I'd admit defeat, and that would be that. I made a prediction.

I was right.

Terrific. My buddies called my insistence on luck "modesty." And the captain went nuts. He cabled the military world that HIS outfit had been doing Special Research and had just made HIS first breakthrough.

Now for an encore.

The next few months were the worst of my enlistment. I knew I had made a lucky guess, informed by a few dozen previous numbers I figured it would NOT be, I knew the truth, but everybody else assumed I was on to something. My next prediction was two numbers off, which had no significance whatever, but looks "close" to those who don't understand the problem. What a mess.

It took months of wrong predictions for me to talk myself off this boring, stressful, useless gig. The captain decided he had made a mistake bragging about my, that is his, success: the Russians had changed their system in response! I went down as the linguist who almost broke the additive code.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Just finished the third and final season of Wish Me Luck, the BBC spy drama created by Jill Hyem and Lavinia Warner in the 1980s. I haven't been so addictively engaged with a drama since listening to the audio books of the Dos Passos trilogy. I love the concept: British female spies working with the resistance in occupied France. I think the first season is the strongest but the entire series holds up for me. I love it.

Some thoughts about why I like it, in no particular order:

giving each new season its own slant by introducing new major characters. Keeps the story from getting stale. Keeps the initial premise and retains characters as well.

extraordinary production design. I don't know what their budget was but it has a very authentic look and feel, indoors and out, in villages, in mountains.

Wish Me Luck, a female-led second world war resistance adventure that ran from 1988 to 1990, was genuinely groundbreaking.

Inspired by the autobiography of secret agent Nancy (The White Mouse) Wake, it starred Kate Buffery as an unhappily married mother who signed on to the Special Operations Executive, run by Jane Asher in Whitehall, to be trained in espionage and dropped into occupied France. Both survived three series, but most of their sisters-in-arms weren't so lucky. Much was filmed on location, but the cast was resolutely English: Trevor Peacock as a kindly Quercy local; Terence Hardiman a fabulously dastardly Nazi (a clear forerunner of Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds). (by Catherine Shoard)

I see all 3 seasons are out in DVD and in our library, maybe in yours, too. This is first rate drama.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Not easy. Most make the mistake of becoming extreme. Wish Me Luck uses a more successful strategy. Each new season introduces a major new character or two, while keeping others. Gives each season its own feel around the same premise. Works for me.

Edwin died in his sleep of natural causes.
He was 74. A musician and composer,
he had gained some fame in the 1980s
both playing jazz piano in local clubs
and writing a jazz opera called Attention!
that was well received
on the west coast.

When he died he had been out of the limelight
for a very long time, though he still
played a gig now and again
and according to his son
who lived in Europe and seldom
saw his father, though they wrote,
Edwin was frustrated about being
forgotten, which is what his life felt like.

In fact, the son pointed out at the funeral,
since no one else seemed to remember,
in 1985 Edwin was named by the newspaper
to be one of the 25 creative persons
in the city who were most responsible
for the city's cultural life in
the past 25 years. One of 25!
Yet so quickly forgotten.

Until death, that is, because the local
music critic came out of retirement
to write a very glowing and very long
post-mortem on Edwin and his piano playing
and his composing, especially of the jazz
opera, and as a result all his CDs
in the library now had waiting lists
and at Amazon the CD of Attention!
was selling briskly, and suddenly
Edwin seemed to be more popular dead
than when he was alive.

But when a reporter said to the son,
You must be proud to see how your father
is held in such high esteem
the son exploded

You fucking asshole!
Why didn't you write about him
when he was alive and could have
appreciated it?

and with this the son caught
the first plane back to Europe
and remembered why in hell
he had left America
in the first place.

Driving in early, hitting rush hour traffic, I was reminded of my one and only year working in corporate America. (Well, the argument can be made that academia is now corporate America but the lifestyle of the workers is definitely different.) This was 1962-3, just out of the Army, pushing figures for Burroughs Corp. It was a very educational year for me.

I ended up hanging out after work at the local bar for an hour or so with a couple guys in my (financial) dept. and with some tech writers. Of the half dozen of them, four were frustrated novelists! One even had an MFA! All had entered corporate America for the MONEY after having kids (usually unexpected). All had killed their dreams and took it out in the subtext of their drinking.

I never met more bright and frustrated men in my life. The men in the Army Security Agency were brighter, and they all had something to look forward to, i.e. getting out of the Army. These guys felt trapped -- and probably were. They were fun to drink with. Lots of wit, lots of book and movie talk, lots of laughs. After an hour they'd run off to their families. They'd return hung over and it would take an hour or two to get them working in the morning. Lots of coffee and donuts.

I thought, by the gods, what a miserable life! That's when I decided then and there to return to school. And I was even pretty good at what I did -- in fact, I was offered the carrot of a good promotion if I stayed. I impressed the hell out of the Big Corporate Boss one day near the end when most of my office was home sick, an emergency came up, and I handled it so well that the Big Corporate Boss called me in to find out Who was that masked man? I had drawn a Venn Diagram to solve the problem (!) and he, knowing what it was ha ha, was most impressed. He wanted me in his department -- asst to the Big Corporate Boss! Mucho Money! Thank the gods, I remembered the frustrated drinking buddies I met with after work and figured what happened to them could happen to me, and I was out of there.

Bob Trevor

I thought I was going directly to UCLA but I was short credits in transferring quarter classes to the semester system, so I made those courses up at Pasadena City College, less expensive, where I met my all time favorite teacher, Bob Trevor, who turned me on to literature and writing. Serendipity. Story of my life.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Watching our rat terrier
curled up against a pillow
on a chair in the bedroom
I am overwhelmed by
a sense of stillness, silence,
order.
My species has
made an art form of
disrupting harmony.
Sketch, happily
oblivious, simply gets
comfortable, closes his eyes,
and brings me and
the world the gift
of tranquility.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

In the late 60s or early 70s, I did a story for NW Magazine on the Portland Beavers radio announcer. The team couldn't afford to take him on road games, so he recreated the games "live" in the studio. He did a one-man show, a theater performance, fascinating to watch.

He got a phone call after each half inning, telling him what each batter did. No balls and strikes. So he made the inning up, complete with sound effects.

He had a bat hanging from the ceiling, which he'd hit with a smaller bat. He had a ball and glove and would throw the ball into the glove in front of the mic and scream, Steeeerike one! He'd hit the bat, Foul into the stands!
He had recorded crowd sounds. I was impressed.

He had great war stories, like about the time his resource got drunk and stopped calling, so he improvised a very long rain delay.

Few were still doing this when I interviewed him. And nobody has for years. But what a treat to see this guy in action. A lost art indeed.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Discovered this 1988 BBC series about two female English spies in occupied France during WWII. First rate! 3 seasons, so I have lots to watch on the Fire if it maintains its high dramatic standards. Hope so, I love its first two episodes.

Once upon a time
I was naked with a naked woman
and we made love in ways
that felt like more than sex.

This actually happened.
More than once.

But here's the rub:
in the longer run,
these experiences, as profound
as they seemed at the time,
had no staying power and changed
nothing. Old barriers remained.
Old habits remained. It was as if
the experiences never happened.

I've long thought that herein
lies a tragic perversion of
human priority. Properly understood,
those experiences should have
inspired awe by their intensity,
spontaneity, physicality and
mystery. Being awe-some, they
should have been cherished as
amazing gifts of connection to
mysterious life forces, a modern
Saturnalia.

Instead, at best we recall them
as good sex and save "awesome" for
finding a penny on the ground
or getting a job promotion
or hearing the latest pop song
or any of hundreds of ordinary
moments in the day.

We've taken the awe out of awesome
and keep too busy and distracted
to consider what we are doing.
Thoreau said most men live lives
of quiet desperation.
I say most men live lives
of noisy distraction.

This is why Norman O. Brown said
Doing nothing, if properly understood,
is the supreme action.

He also said, Murder is
misdirected suicide
(which is awesome).

He also said, Personality is
the original personal property
(which is awesome)

The only advice an old writer
can offer a young writer
is this: persevere - and on
your own terms. Dismiss
those who offer fame and fortune.
Dismiss flattery, which can be
more destructive than character
assassination because you may
believe it.

Always remember your calling:
to tell stories that tell the truth
in ways that are elegant.

Friday, April 5, 2013

Some first rate brooding while out on chores today, testing the new point of view for the Brinkley material. I'm encouraged. If you posit a narrator who doesn't know what he is doing, then you can do anything! Ha! Suddenly I see much more (dark) comic potential here. I'm excited, always a good sign. The joys of brooding.

A sudden idea came to me a moment ago. I found myself brooding unexpectedly about Brinkley and CJ, the main characters in my new novel/novella struggling to be born. What I know about it is this: CJ is on the road, as at the end of my last novel, Sodom, Gomorrah & Jones ("This book surprised me. It is intelligent, funny, bawdy and real. The protagonist is such a likable fellow adrift in an America he no longer understands, that one cannot help but root for him." Amazon), and meets another old fart, Brinkley, and they begin traveling together, each in his own rig. CJ is concerned about dying: he thinks it should be his right as a citizen to get a "peaceful pill" for the purpose when it's time. Brinkley, a Catholic, does not agree with him. CJ ends up dying of natural causes. Brinkley brings his ashes home to Portland. What I've been struggling with is the point of view. I tried omnipotent. I tried first person Brinkley, which was better. But what just flashed into my brain is a very disjointed first person "journal" of a book, in which Brinkley says up front that he's not a writer, that his grandson is going to publish this as a free ebook on Amazon ... but that Brinkley has thoughts about CJ and what they argued about that he wants to share because he thinks the issue is important. He tried to get a couple writer friends interested but they dismissed him. As best he can, he'll now do it on his own.Of course, this is all bullshit, this will be a highly crafted, carefully wrought delivery of "amateur writing," but this will be the premise to the reader. What I like about this approach is its non-linearity, it's easy movement to vignettes and aphorisms, its lightness of spirit, its Nietzsche-like approach to the most serious question we can ask, How do we die? Of course, this would be a hell of a lot harder to write than a traditional novel. I like the challenge as well. I usually opt for the more difficult alternative. I easily bore myself ha ha.So! Will this stick? I have no idea. I won't be doing anything serious, I suspect, until summer.

I'm overdue for listening, start to finish, to my favorite opera, Weill/Brecht's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Probably my favorite work of art. The ending is above, from a recent Los Angeles production, which I flew down to see. It's rarely done, although there is a woman in Portland who has wanted to produce it for decades. A good work of art is like a blood transfusion, a transfusion of the spirit. It's time soon.

I think my design for a hyperdrama theater is very doable and would be a large step toward attracting an audience for the new dramaturgy. I wish I'd thought of it 20 years ago. I wish Kickstarter had been around then. But hopefully a young theater artist will understand the possibility and significance of hyperdrama and go for it.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

I used to think the best way
to pass was in my sleep until
I realized this would mean
my wife would wake up
with a corpse.

The most humane, direct,
easy and logical way to pass
is by taking a "peaceful pill"
given to me by my doctor,
which should be the right
of any citizen over 70,
but this is not the case
and no such pill is available
to me in a culture that
considers the request for
one immoral, even deranged.

My mother died on the spot.
Wham! dropped to the hospital
floor, dead. My father died
on the spot. Wham! dropped
to a cousin's floor, dead.
Maybe it runs in the family
but with my luck I'd drop
wham! while explaining to
my students that the end
of act two coincides with
the low point in the journey
of the protagonist.

Maybe the best I can do
is get a terminal illness
with a very short leash
two or three months to live
and therefore qualify for
the pill from my doctor
under Oregon law. But
this is a mere crumb
of control over what should
be any elder citizen's primary
business, the control of
one's own death.

No, the culture makes it
hard for me. I have to
buy a gun, or jump from
a bridge, or step in
front of a train. Fuck
you, culture! How
dare you call yourself
humane! Where is my
pill? Where is my pill?

I'm not saying I'm ready
to use it. I'm saying I
want the empowerment
of knowing that it's there
when it's time.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

We have become immune
to war. Violence is
an adrenalin rush in
a computer game. Bombings,
mortar fire, are computer
programs. With a volunteer
army, almost no one knows
a soldier. War is far away,
abstract, as nebulous as
love.

We can fix it. We can
make war visceral again.

A universal draft increases
the demographic reach of
those waiting for coffins.
If we give each soldier
a great sword, then we too
can behead the enemy.
We need more beheadings.
We need more blood, more
brains splattered on uniforms.

Let's put the stench back
into war so our literal minds
can recall what the hell
we're dealing with here.

Yes, it would be nice if
reading Homer were enough
but obviously our imaginations
are dead. We'll never realize
the true horror of war unless
we make it visceral again.

So I say, more blood
and guts! Enough stench,
enough gore, maybe we'll
again feel war's pain
and take to the streets,
demanding an end to it.

Earlier blog (archived)

ENTERTAINMENTS

Career Support

"Charles' impact on Northwest literature and theater over the past twenty-plus years is impressive. As a critic I've followed his work since the early 1980s, and no playwright has had such an important or long-lasting effect on this community's cultural life." --Bob Hicks, Senior Critic (retired), The Oregonian

"During the years we've worked together, I feel Charles was the clearest and most important theatre voice in Oregon." --Steve Smith, Artistic Director (retired), Theatre Workshop

"This play has balls!" -- Anonymous young man, shouting in the dark before curtain call for Country Northwestern.

2006
Finalist, Mystery of the Year (Foreword Magazine), for Dead Body In A Small Room.

2007
Begin making digital films. Deconstructing Sally, perhaps the best of the bunch ("Deconstructing Sally has voice: It’s a good example of how skillful and individualistic democratic filmmaking can be.")

2008Changing Key, a video hyperdrama and lecture-demonstration presented to national hypertext conference.